It's cool that you're able to turn that into something positive for you.

My mother used to use Hitler et al. to tell me to quit feeling sorry for myself. Since my ancestors had to deal with pogroms and famine and poverty and persecution, what right did I have to complain about anything in my relatively privileged life?

That's part of the work I've got to do with myself: reorienting my mind to quit focusing on the negative and look instead for the positive.

_________________________
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.~ Oscar Wilde

Me too. I am trying to get there. And I am seeing progress (I think??). I need to quit focusing on bad things, and more on good.

I wrote something about two weeks about anger when I got triggered by something, and almost posted but I am glad that I did not. But it ended with a positive observation: that my anger seemed to be a mask of/response to the hurt that I feel.

So maybe I need to work on the hurt and try to find those moments of joy. Some of my biggest hurt comes from my damaged ability to connect with others the way I would want to and I think was at one time capable of. Need to keep working on that.

Yeah, when I get in those moments when I can let go and be in the moment and feel joy and feel positive responses from others, it feels really good. I forget all the regrets, hurts, slights, etc. And I don't really have much reason to be angry. I think more of that would be good!

We all seem to have the same internal thermometer or compass that tells us that, yes, there is really a normal temperature and yes there is really north and east. We expect that there is a rational and right explanation.

Those of us who have been hurt seem to have the best compass or thermometer. We know keenly that where we have been hurt is not the direction of normal or right. Those who are "hurters" (perps) don't seem to have very good compasses or thermometers. They seem to be blind to what is north or right or normal.

Our abuse maybe has opened our eyes or kept them open to the idea that, yes there really is right and wrong. Yes, there really is truth and false.

We have been there. We know that it really hurts to be hurt. We know that suffering is real and not a product of our perception.

Does this also give us a keener sense to joy. Once the throbbing decreases, are we more aware of the beauty of the spring flowers? Do we become more aware of the need to love and support our fellows?

Rather, it's HOW MUCH BETTER your life COULD have been, and SHOULD BE.

Whatever problems you're dealing with in your life right now, problems that, more than likely, are a at least a side-effect of sexual abuse, they WOULDN'T be there if the abuse had not occurred.

Sure, you didn't get rounded up by the NKVD or the Nazis and you weren't gassed or executed or wound up working in a Gulag in Siberia or working as a slave laborer making weapons for the Nazis or being firebombed in a city as a civilian or being accused of having Jewish Blood and being exterminated or WHATEVER. SO WHAT?

What does this have to do with the fact that, for whatever reasons, your life has been NEGATIVELY affected to the point that you're coming HERE of all places.

Perhaps one might say that you're seeing your glass half-full, whilst I see it half-empty. That is nonsense to me.

I will NEVER be grateful for thinking of how much worse my life could have been, NEVER.

I think it is quite importent, to me, to remember of how much pain and other hurts and bad things there are in the world, and to remind myself of what good there is, and always have been, in my life. Because even at the worst of the abuses, there still was good in my life. I still had clothes, food, place to live, school. Those may seem like little things, but to someone who do not have even those, I think they are large. However:

Originally Posted By: Hauser

Rather, it's HOW MUCH BETTER your life COULD have been, and SHOULD BE.

Perhaps one might say that you're seeing your glass half-full, whilst I see it half-empty. That is nonsense to me.

I will NEVER be grateful for thinking of how much worse my life could have been, NEVER.

I was conditioned always to see the glass as half-empty, and to be grateful that it's not completely empty -- but not to be too grateful because any day when you're not looking "they" can come along and take away what little you already have.

It's predicated on a basic worldview that life is miserable and that horribleness is the default condition of humanity and that there's really nothing you can do about it but accept it. You can complain about it and blackly joke about it and that offers a bit of respite, but nothing can change the basic fact that life is on average pretty awful and can always be worse.

It's a psychological survival mechanism. If you go about expecting life to be all sunshine and lollipops, you will inevitably be disappointed when they DO come and round you up and send you to the gas chambers, for example. If you assume, though, that life is by default horrible, you won't be disappointed and when good things actually do manage to happen they can be appreciated for what they are.

It may not be a particularly healthy attitude, but it works.

_________________________
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.~ Oscar Wilde

i watch a lot of documentaries on WWII as well. and read a lot of books on it. I laugh at myself because I once had a dream where I was tasked with redesigning Auschwitz-Birkenau. I had the plans and everything in this dream and was presenting it to Nazi officers. (I then decided to lay off the Hilter books before bed.) haha.

for me, this topic is weird. i don't have any family connections that I know of, but have always been fascinated by it. Maybe it's the whole "gay" thing. "my people were killed" etc. but maybe, like you, it is just that connection of abuse. i think reading stories from the hallocaust is fascinating because for those who were in camps, they were picked, collected, sent away, and isolated from the world. but the world still was going on ouside the walls. Reading stories from people who lived near the camps, they all were saying they suspected things were going on but didn't know to what extent. nor couldn't do anything about it. i think that is the same pattern of abuse. the isolation. the outside world not knowing what's going on. everyone on the outside still keeps going with their lives, but if you are inside, time stops.

My father was totally obsessed with WWII so I have a bit of a familial biasStill, there was an amazing book that resonated deeply with me based on the experiences ofa concentration camp survivor named Viktor Frankl

Jarrad, that is a VERY interesting perspective that you just brought up. The notion of us survivors being caught inside our own isolation whilst the world goes on about its business. Very interesting.

Craig, I'm well versed in the history of the Holocaust, the architects of the plans, who carried it out, etc. Individual accounts and individual triumphs of the spirit are nice and all to read about, but I don't really care about the subject on that level. I am more concerned with how a democracy and the subjects it served sealed their own fate by turning over too much power (legally elected I should add) to the Nazis.

Why they did this is a subject for a different discussion, but, I guess my point is, had the populous of Germany not blindly acquiesced their freedoms to a madman that was, from the very beginning, frothing at the mouth and so obviously full of hatred, none of this could have come to pass. In this sense, the individual stories of who died and who survived this episode in history is a trivial matter.

I say this last sentence without reservation or apology. They way I see it, we Americans are repeating the very same mistakes that the people of post WWI Germany made. Of course, I hope I'm wrong.

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